But it is
only the largest corporations that can afford to play the Medici,
hiring skilled artisans to custom-design musical expressions
of their corporate culture. In the day-to-day world of business
communications, music is not commissionedit is bought
and sold in bulk, as a commodity.

Ever since
Adorno formulated his critique of the music business as a "culture
industry," popular music scholars have had to contend with
his vision of its most absolute evil: "the reification
of music, its naked commodity character."1
Even outside the Frankfurt School, commodification is hardly
a nice word to throw around, either in the recording
studio or the seminar room. ("Its just product,
man!" and so on.) But to enter the domain of production
music is to enter a strange para-aesthetic realm where music
is unashamedly "product," and where all the supposed
evils of the mass-produced commodity formreification,
standardization, interchangeability of parts, planned obsolescenceare
everyday virtues.

WHAT
IS PRODUCTION MUSIC?

Production
music gets its name from the producers who use it to
score a wide range of corporate communications. It is ubiquitous:
Network Music, Inc., purveyor of one of the largest production
music libraries, licenses its tracks for use in "slide
shows, radio and television programming, films, web sites, commercials,
promos, multimedia presentations, documentaries, training videos,
music-on-hold, in-flight services, and computer programs."

In material
form, a production music library is a collection of CDs, constantly
updated, usually by subscription. Each CD contains about a dozen
thematically organized tracks. Production music, like any useful
mass-produced commodity, comes in all shapes and sizes, conveniently
packaged. You get full-length musical themes (2:00-4:00), plus
60- or 30-second edits for use in broadcast commercials; some
of the cuts have been decomposed further into detachable stings
and fanfares. Several tracks will appearwith instrumentation
reduced and prominent melodic lines excisedas underscores,
suitable for voice-overs. Many houses offer a classical music
library; there is usually a sound effects library; and some
companies offer production elements libraries, which
allow you to construct your own sonic punctuation by piling
up Glides, Sweeps, Drones, Winds, Jets, Flybys, Lasers, Zaps,
Bursts, Sprays, Snarls, Missiles, Guitars, Explosions, Hits,
and Kickers. (Your least favorite top-40 station undoubtedly
owns one of these collections.)

In effect,
what is being sold is the sonic equivalent of clip art; and,
just as with clip art, indexing is key. The need for
a powerful indexing system is much more acute in the aural realm
than in the visual: the eye can scan dozens of images at once,
while music must be listened to and through in real time. Unlike
visual images, which are "naturally" organized by
their manifest representational content, music, especially instrumental
(abstract) music, provides us with no obvious hooks upon which
to hang our categories.

Production
music companies have thus recognized indexing and retrieval
as the challenge for large music libraries; semiotic
clarity is now a key selling point. A 1998 demo
clip from the Network Music web site makes the value proposition
persuasively explicit.

The sales pitch assures us blithly that we can
"link a precise image, nuance, and feeling with just the
right Network theme " This is a powerful semiotic
claimperhaps, in the minds of many music aestheticians, an incredible one. Consult thelist
of over 300 keywords

used in Network Musics TrakFinder™; then see the software
in action. Keywords like "desolate," "sensual,"
and "bold" call up lists of evocatively named tracksMargin
of Victory; Cold Sweat; Body Talk.These names are supplemented
with pithy descriptive sentences. Here are three
excerpts from the Network Music Production Library, along
with their descriptions, to help calibrate your music-semiotic
ear: Aftermath; Inner Strength; Common Vision.

WHAT'S
THE DIFFERENCE?

Lets
stop for a moment to ponder the structural implications of all
this. The Trakfinder database, literally thousands of paired
musical themes and expressive descriptions, looks for all the
world like a systematic linking of signifiers (music) and signifieds
(description). In other words, a language in the Saussure-ian
sense. (Another production music company touts its software,
Music Finder, as " a simple language, which has
been designed professionally to, as closely as possible, relate
words to music.") This would explain one of the most oddly
attractive things about production music: its hermeneutic panache.
Unlike academic musicology, production music houses seem completely
uninvested in a discourse of musical autonomy. (It doesn't sell.)
They take musical semantics for granted.

The initial
excitement quickly sours, however. A glance back at Orchestral
Corporatemakes the problem painfully clear:
the same adjectives recur again and again, and there is thus no
one-to-one correspondence of signifier and signified, no real
différence. (Whats the difference between an
"optimistic confident theme" and an "optimistic
prestigious building theme"?) Trakfinders keywords
are sledgehammers, not scalpels. Many of the 300+ terms overlap:
bold, dynamic, assertive, aspiring, competition all dredge
up pretty much the same set of tracks.

This is not
really a language of musical expression; it is something interestingly
less, something more in keeping with the radically commodified
nature of production music: a system of musical objects. The
System of Objects was the title of Jean Baudrillards
first book, an investigation of the signifying power of commodities
in consumer society. Baudrillard was impatient with apologists
for advertising who spoke idly of branded objects as a "language."
Yes, he admits, we all classify people by the make and model of
car they drive, and think we can thereby deduce their personalities;
but this is "a system of classification and not a language."
Lacking syntax, and endowed with only a semi-coherent lexicon,
the system of objects is "merely a range of distinguishing
marks more or less arbitrarily keyed to a range of stereotyped
personalities a set of pigeonholes."2

A system
of musical objects arises when music stops trying to beor
trying not to bea language, and accepts its "naked
commodity character"; we get the Trakfinder, in which
a range of distinguishing musical marks is more or less arbitrarily
keyed to a range of stereotyped expressive contents.

More or less
arbitrarilybut it undoubtedly works. (One hardly imagines
the average TV watcher springing up during the nightly news and
exclaiming something like, "That is just not correct musical
underscoringfor a school shooting!" I thought not.)Both the classical musician and the rock star have taken for
granted that musics significance ends where its commodification
begins; but the pragmatics of production music argue the opposite,
and point the way towards a post-aesthetic discourse of musical
meaning. Music may or may not be a language; but in late-capitalist
society it is always a commodity, and thus is always part of a
(signifying) system.